More than half of respondents in a survey carried out by managed cloud provider 2nd Watch say at least half of their deployment pipelines are automated, with 63% saying they can deploy new applications in less than six weeks.

The study, which garnered responses from more than 1,000 participants from US companies with at least 1,000 employees, found that companies embracing cloud automation were able to deploy new applications and workloads faster and more frequently.

Alongside the almost two thirds who said deploying new applications took less than six weeks, 44% said deploying new code to production took a day or less, while 54% say they are deploying new code changes at least once a week. A similar number (55%) say they are measuring application quality by testing everything, while two thirds argue at least half of all their quality assessments, such as lint and unit tests, are also automated.

“The survey results reiterate what we’re hearing from clients and prospects: automation, driven by cloud technologies, is critical to the rapid delivery of new workloads and applications,” said Jeff Aden, 2nd Watch co-founder. “Companies are automating everything from artifact creation to deployment pipelines and process, which includes metrics, documentation and data.

“The result is faster time to market for new applications, and less application downtime.”

Earlier this month, a report from Puppet found particular discrepancies between higher and lower performing organisations when it came to automation. Top performing firms automated 72% of all configuration management processes on average, while lower ranked companies spent almost half (46%) of their time on manual configuration.